


The Sea and the Storm

by Nemonus



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Season/Series 02 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 20:19:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9511790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Altean magic looked more like science, sometimes, so her people had used words for it based on the words they already knew: electricity, energy, readings and charts. Haggar wanted her Druids to be impressionable and impressive, so she rid her teachings of those words.Or, Haggar didn't expect the fight against Allura to go this way.





	

Allura had slept ten thousand years, and Haggar hated her for it.  
  
Haggar didn’t need _another_ reason for her ancient, routine, jealous hatred. Alteans were conquered, and Galra were conquerors, calming a scrabbling, rainbow-prism universe and taming it in a violet cage. Haggar had taken the quintessence that she understood and changed it. It had grown with her, and if it had become darker as it had become more sophisticated, well? Perhaps that was an effect of the techniques with which she learned it. Always learning, ageless.  
  
Meanwhile, all that time, Allura had slept like a child. She was so young-old as she faced an ancient thing, her hair bleached white and falling around her like a cloud of ejecta from a star throwing tantrums in its old age, and maybe - no. It was not inexperience that put Allura beyond Haggar’s understanding. It was strategy, because Haggar could fight strategy with more. Considering Allura’s strategy would give the witch something to do when she was not pulled to and fro by Zarkon’s obsession. He felt the Altean magic pulling at his own mind, telling him that it looked like a _lion._  
  
Haggar faced Allura on the alter and did not, at first, imagine that she would use her own face as a weapon. Her teeth, maybe. Allura was not looking at her teeth.  
  
“You’re Altean!”  
  
The quintessence scorched Haggar’s skin, billowed her hair out in a static cloud. She hadn’t taken the cowl down in so long that the cold air felt alien against the part of her hair. She was old, wasn’t she? She had ten thousand years, and from it she had grown thin skin. She was unused to fighting like this. Better syringes, better other people’s souls trussed up to machines.  
  
It had been a long war, though, and this was not the first time she had fought. Her reserves of spite/courage were familiar.

She had not thought of herself as Altean in a long time, so that to hear it spoken was a shock like the lightning.

* * *

  
  
The Druids had never known.  
  
Haggar gathered them from homefronts across the galaxies, choosing Galra soldiers who were lucky or who sparked with quintessence. When the platoons marched back into the bays from which they had emerged to kill planets, she chose those. Gardak the strong, Kidaz the clever, Serik the torturer. They took their reassignment and then they took the first rituals, and found out that rituals hurt. Haggar taught them to be drained and fill again.  
  
They lost their faces to shadows under masks, and maybe some of them wondered whether the same had happened to Haggar too.  
  
Altean magic looked more like science, sometimes, so her people had used words for it based on the words they already knew: electricity, energy, readings and charts. Haggar wanted her Druids to be impressionable and impressive, so she rid her teachings of those words.

* * *

  
  
Shiro had never known.  
  
Her Champion had never looked beneath her cowl. He had never questioned her hair, but who would? Galra also went white before their deaths, if they lived long enough to die old. She wondered sometimes at how similar to the Galra Shiro’s species was. Humans, he had said. The last character was the plural prefix. Humans: monochromatic skin and bare, rounded ears and strange, small eyes like flares and pits. When he was in Haggar’s care, Shiro did not have time to care about species as much as either of them might have liked. He was a scientist and she was an explorer, but here, they were both gladiators by trade.  
  
Now, of course, there was also the matter of the boy with the Marmora blade.  
  
Her Champion was a failed experiment, but he was displaying a satisfyingly high amount of loyalty to the _idea_ of the Galra even after he escaped.

* * *

  
  
Zarkon knew.  
  
Zarkon had been there for the first war. Haggar had clawed her way up onto a ship without knowing whose it was, desperate to get away from the laser-blasted ground beneath her. The Empire had been smaller then, less grand. So had her quintessence been, but maybe that was part of what had let her escape the bombing and the pits after the bombing. She had known how to channel the power, not just to communicate with technology built for that purpose, but with anything: the landscape, the life force of the trees.  
  
She felt them dying, and that knowledge helped her suss her way into the cores of planets that the empire would predate later. Even as she crawled onto the ship and clutched the troop deck, her head filled with the smells of rubber and aluminum, she had a familiar, creative revelation. Planets hid quintessence in certain ways. The empire had already unlocked them, almost by accident.  
  
When she heard footsteps, she clenched her hand beneath her charred robes and gathered quintessence to it. At the same time, she shifted the color of her face to treacherous violet.  
  
(She would always think of it that way, even in the Empire; her subtle Druids wore the bright color of traitors, and this was one of the several key things she kept from them.)  
  
At first, she thought she had been mistaken in the second choice: the person whose boots hit the floor near her face wore the flightsuit of a paladin.

* * *

  
  
Now, Allura knew.  
  
She knew that while she was sleeping, Haggar had been growing and growing and learning. Haggar had been digging into thoughts and forces and monsters, tearing out the things inside. The liege, with all the purity of her title, never got past the skin.  
  
And oh, Allura was full of that life force. She bled like forests, screamed like the hurricanes that whipped the seas of Aeltea into salty foam. She fought Haggar with all the force of her barely-breathing species behind her, and what had it meant that she had seen Haggar revealed to also be part of that laborious breath?  
  
Allura rocketed away on a pillar of fire, and Haggar cowered on the floor, thin skin against hard metal. Of course plans came to her quickly - she had had so many years to find them, to find the loopholes. Evacuation could only go so many ways. She had already mapped out the evacuation, with or without Zarkon.  
  
What had Allura learned? Maybe she had seen the years in Haggar’s eyes. Maybe she had seen the campaigns, the plans that broke against her shores. Live that long, betray that much, maybe the years sink in and become shrewd madness.  
  
Breathe in: Altean. Breathe out: Galra.  
  
And then?

Haggar stood up.

Well, Allura had already given her a glimpse of her path.

Destroy another ~~innocent~~ world.

 


End file.
